Rafael Guastavino: Genius at Work on Ellis Island

For nearly fifty years I have managed to stay away from two of New York’s most famous landmarks: the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I have never been particularly attracted to seeing a place simply because one is supposed to see it. I am much more interested in scouting a location, when the visit has a purpose and the building has something I need to understand.

So yesterday I took the train downtown and boarded the ferry. The boat delivered me almost literally to the feet of Lady Liberty, whom I once again managed to ignore. I had left the comfort of my apartment in Brooklyn for something else: the vaulted ceiling of the Registry Room at Ellis Island, the work of Rafael Guastavino and the company he founded.

That was then

There is something cinematic about approaching these monuments by boat, as though one were entering the postcard rather than looking at it. It reminded me of the way Woody Allen moves characters in and out of the past in Midnight in Paris. Here, however, the architecture itself is enough to change the sense of time.

Ellis Island became the federal immigration station in 1892. The first complex was built largely of wood, and in 1897 it was destroyed by fire. No lives were lost, but the buildings were devastated and immigration processing was temporarily moved back to the Barge Office at Battery Park while the federal government prepared to rebuild. This time the buildings had to be fireproof, a requirement that belonged very much to its time. American cities had learned to fear fire, and with reason. Chicago had burned in 1871 and Boston the following year. New York had also suffered major fires. A public building receiving thousands of people every day could no longer be conceived as a great wooden structure.

The competition for the new Ellis Island complex was won by the architects Edward Lippincott Tilton and William A. Boring. Their Main Immigration Building opened in 1900. On the second floor was the Registry Room, later known as the Great Hall, where millions of newcomers were examined, questioned and processed before entering the United States. The ceiling I had come to see, however, was not part of the original building.

In 1916 German saboteurs detonated munitions stored at Black Tom Wharf in New Jersey, less than a mile from the island. The explosion was enormous. Windows shattered, parts of the Main Building were damaged and the roof suffered serious damage. The Statue of Liberty was also affected. During repairs carried out in 1917, the ceiling of the Registry Room was rebuilt with Guastavino tile vaulting, which is the ceiling that survives today.

The Great Hall

Guastavino had himself arrived in New York from Spain in 1881, eleven years before Ellis Island opened. What he brought with him was a construction technique rooted in Mediterranean traditions, particularly the thin tile vaulting he had first seen in his natice Valencia while exploring the neighborhood around Plaza de la Reina. In America he developed and patented a system, creating lightweight, strong and highly fire-resistant vaults that soon attracted the attention of major architectural firms.

His work eventually appeared in nearly one thousand buildings throughout the United States. By the time Ellis Island required reconstruction, the Guastavino name had become associated not only with beauty but with the very quality that American cities were desperately seeking: resistance to fire. Standing beneath the ceiling at Ellis Island, however, I found myself thinking about something different.

Millions of immigrants passed through that room, and after 1917 some of them came from Spain, Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean. I began to wonder what those people saw when they looked upward. We tend to think of Ellis Island from the American perspective: the immigrant arriving before the the skyline of the new country . But architecture travels too. For those from Barcelona, Valencia, and Naples, those tiled vaults may not have appeared entirely foreign. The materials, the rhythm of the arches and the logic of the construction belonged to an architectural vocabulary with roots much closer to the world they had just left behind.

Perhaps someone arriving frightened, exhausted and uncertain looked up and recognized something familiar. In a hall filled with officials speaking another language, surrounded by medical procedures, the ceiling may have offered an unexpected fragment of recognition. There is no way of knowing whether anyone actually experienced it that way, but standing under the Guastavino mantel more than a century later, that's all I could think about for a while.

Guastavino’s contribution to American architecture is usually discussed in terms of engineering, fireproof construction and beauty. All of that is true, but there is another dimension that interests me more and more as I continue to work on this project. An immigrant did not simply arrive in America and adapt. He brought something with him, and America itself changed because of it.

Photos by Montes-Bradley